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In Brooklyn, Bracing for Hurricane Barclays

The Barclays Center arena has been the subject of contentious community meetings.Credit
Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

THEY talk about it as if it were a force of nature.

“We’re bracing ourselves, almost like hurricane preparedness, where you go out and tape the windows and buy the candles and you are not sure if it’s going to come — and if it does, if it’s ever going to get back to normal,” said Susan Doban, an architect who lives with her family on Bergen Street in Park Slope.

“It’s like a volcano,” said Lenny Goodstein, taking a break from renovating his brownstone in Prospect Heights. “We don’t know where the lava is going to land.”

For some, the uncertainty is almost apocalyptic. “It’s the end of the community as we know it,” said Michelle de la Uz, the director of a nonprofit housing organization in Brooklyn, “and the beginning of something new. What that ‘new’ is, we don’t yet understand.”

On Friday, the Barclays Center arena, wedged into the borough’s busiest intersection like a giant, rusty bread basket, will open after nine years of operatic disputation and delays: community lawsuits over New York State’s ability to seize private land and over the developer’s obligations; the collapse of the real estate market; the replacement of a star architect; the rescue from a Russian oligarch; racial friction; rats; traffic; and unfulfilled promises.

Amid the festivities, though, the arena stands as an island, a reminder of what is missing. The 16 surrounding towers — primarily residential — that were originally planned by the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, for the 22-acre, $4.9 billion Atlantic Yards project have yet to be built. The 10,000 or so jobs promised have not materialized. Of the 2,250 affordable housing units pledged out of 6,300, only 181 are planned for a first tower, and ground for the building has yet to be broken.

In the days before the hip-hop mogul Jay-Z, a part owner of the Nets, inaugurates the arena with a series of concerts, the air tingles with the dust of last-second construction and mixed emotions: excitement and wariness, anger and resignation.

Surrounding residents fear that unruly basketball fans will stagger drunkenly onto their sidewalks, that Armageddon-like traffic will blockade their streets, that already-squeezed parking spaces will be swallowed, that crime and rodents will run rampant and that housing and jobs will never come about.

Others hope that the 1,900 part-time jobs offered at the arena will help lift a severely underemployed borough, that retail chains opening along Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues will spur small businesses and that property values will soar.

For Forest City Ratner, it is a triumph just to have built the 18,200-seat sports and entertainment complex when other large-scale public-private developments, like the West Side stadium, have failed. The company deployed a sophisticated lobbying network, spent millions of dollars on legal fees and public relations efforts, leveraged $305 million in public subsidies and found allies in a divided community beyond the development-friendly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the unrelenting borough president, Marty Markowitz.

The developer says it will build the remainder of the project, though it could take up to 25 years, and not the 10 originally planned.

“When you look at the record of this company — and this is very serious — we finish virtually everything,” said Bruce C. Ratner, the chairman and chief executive of Forest City Ratner, which built The New York Times’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. “We don’t give up.”

On the precipice of change, all that people can do is wait.

“I was never particularly happy with the process to get to this point,” Ms. Doban, the architect from Park Slope, said. “Now I am of the mind-set that I am living in this amazing experiment and I am going to see what happens. I feel like I either have to do that or move.”

APPEARING on T-shirts and billboards and in Brooklyn coffee shop windows, the Nets’ crisp two-toned logo is ubiquitous these days. The tangled history of the project is anything but black and white.

By 2002, Forest City Ratner was already Brooklyn’s largest developer, best known for its seven-million-square-foot MetroTech office complex downtown and its two malls at the Atlantic Terminal transportation hub. The Bloomberg administration was rezoning and extending Downtown Brooklyn. A prime site sat opposite the malls, just outside the planned redevelopment area, with more than 8.5 acres of state-owned railroad tracks surrounded by four distinct neighborhoods bounded by Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues, and Vanderbilt Avenue and Dean Street.

Unlocking the land’s potential required a city administration willing to cede authority to the state government that controlled the rail yards. The arena would be the cornerstone of the development; the Nets, which Mr. Ratner bought for $300 million, would be the linchpin.

The city and the community would get jobs and housing in exchange for subsidies; the state, would get a new subway terminal and $100 million for rebuilt rail yards; the developer would make a legacy and maybe even a profit on luxury condominiums.

Brooklyn would have a major professional team for the first time since the Dodgers left for Los Angeles after the 1957 season. Frank Gehry designed a glass world that would loom over the low-rise neighborhoods of brownstones and housing projects. A park on the arena roof would connect to a 60-story office building named Miss Brooklyn that would surpass the Williamsburgh Savings Bank as the tallest building in the borough.

The project was billed as a win for all. But opponents emerged at the first news conference in December 2003, handing out cookies shaped like turkeys. Upset over the project’s scale and the displacement of hundreds of people it would involve, that group evolved into Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, the plan’s most vocal critic, led by Daniel Goldstein, who would later refuse to leave his condominium on the condemned arena land.

Forest City conducted an aggressive public relations campaign with the slogan “Jobs, Housing, Hoops,” hoping to use that platform to secure support from community organizers, public-housing residents and Brooklyn’s influential black clergy.

In June 2005, it signed a “Community Benefits Agreement” with eight nonprofit organizations, establishing obligations of housing and hiring, and vowing to create amenities like a health care center, a meditation room, a school and eight acres of open space. The deal, lacking city authority, had inherent conflicts; three of the signatories got financing from Forest City.

An independent compliance monitor was supposed to determine if the company hit its targets. If not, it would pay $500,000 to be used by the lead signatory, Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, or Build, a job-training group that, financed by Forest City, operates out of MetroTech. The monitor has yet to be hired.

Among the contract’s signatories were Acorn, a national low-income housing advocacy group, since disbanded, that had received contributions from Forest City, and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a longtime civil rights advocate who initially led seven pastors in seeking to mitigate the development’s impact.

“At one point, it became clear to me that this project is going to move,” Mr. Daughtry, 81, said recently. He recalled telling the other pastors: “It seems to me that you all are just going to be talking and when you get finished, other groups will have negotiated other parts of this project.”

Mr. Daughtry formed the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance with $50,000 in seed money from Forest City. His organization is being given 54 tickets and the use of a suite at every Barclays Center event. The tickets will be distributed to community members through a lottery, Mr. Daughtry said.

By promoting jobs and affordable housing, said the Rev. Clinton Miller of Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Clinton Hill, Forest City was able to sell the project to members of the black community and create an early schism between them and the residents of the nearby brownstone neighborhoods, many of whom were white. Mr. Miller did not join the plaintiffs, led by Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, who first sued in 2006 to block the use of eminent domain to acquire the property for Atlantic Yards.

“We were never against the project; we just wanted the process to be fair and inclusive,” said Mr. Miller, who has formed a new group of 25 pastors to monitor the project.

When the company enlisted Jay-Z and engaged other leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton, Mr. Ratner made it difficult for some in the black community to criticize the project, Mr. Miller said.

Ms. de la Uz, executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee, whose group will join protests at the arena’s opening, said the division became more along economic lines. “Now, because the project has evolved, you find black and white all on the same side — feeling like we’ve been hoodwinked, we’ve been bamboozled,” she said.

INSIDE the Barclays Center, the drone of discontent drops away. The space is at once cavernous and intimate; an expansive hall peers into the bowl of the arena, with its sleek black seats and brilliant flashing scoreboards. The V.I.P. areas are marked by modern chandeliers, carpets shaded in gray, leather couches, Italian-made stainless steel beer towers and a vaulted Champagne bar.

From the street, passers-by can see the suspended scoreboard and look through the glass windows on Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues into the arena’s ground-floor retail spaces.

Mr. Gehry’s elaborate design, jettisoned once the financial crisis hit, was replaced by a more compact plan: Ellerbe Becket designed the arena structure, while SHoP Architects created the weathered steel exterior and coordinating interiors. With tax-free bonds and more than $200 million from the Russian billionaire Mikhail D. Prokhorov, who now owns 80 percent of the Nets, the arena was built in just two years. So much for cost-cutting; at $1 billion, Barclays Center is the nation’s most expensive new arena, and it shows.

What is left unseen is more problematic.

Forest City never clearly announced the number of jobs it would deliver. Instead, politicians like Senator Charles E. Schumer proclaimed the creation of 10,000 jobs in 2004 at the state of Brooklyn address.

The 2006 environmental impact study done by the state agency overseeing the project, the Empire State Development Corporation, projected Atlantic Yards would generate 8,560 permanent jobs and 16,924 construction jobs.

A Forest City spokesman, Joe DePlasco, said that an average of 841 workers per day were on site over the past year, and that more construction jobs would come in the full build-out of the residential towers, though he declined to be specific. An office tower that would have supplied thousands of jobs has been delayed.

This spring, Forest City sponsored job fairs for Brooklyn residents that drew more than 35,000 people — for 2,000 arena jobs, 1,900 of which were part time.

Only two participants received union cards. Seven participants, however, filed a lawsuit in 2011 against Build and Forest City Ratner, claiming they had been misled. An appeal by Forest City was denied in June.

According to its agreement with Empire State Development, Forest City has until May 2013 to begin work on the first residential tower or pay a $5 million penalty. Mr. Ratner said the ground-breaking would be on Dec. 18.

Forest City wants to use modular construction for that 32-story tower to reduce costs. While 50 percent of the units will be affordable, the developer made a subtle switch: adding more one-bedroom and studio apartments than the two-bedrooms it was supposed to build. City subsidies are paid per unit, not per bedroom, allowing the company to build smaller units while getting the same financing.

“The first building is not going to be the perfect building, but unless we start building, we are never going to get where we want to go,” said Bertha Lewis, the former head of Acorn, who is still involved in the process.

But opponents wonder if Forest City will be able to finance the other 11 residential towers planned for Phase 2, which it must complete by 2035. (Forest City negotiated to pay the $100 million it owes the Metropolitan Transportation Authority for the rail yards in installments through 2031.) The company lost an appeal in court and must submit a new environmental impact study for the project.

“This should not be a construction zone for 25 years,” said Councilwoman Letitia James, a longtime critic who represents Prospect Heights and Fort Greene. Mr. Ratner said that the affordable housing, half of the 4,500 rental units, would be built, as would the remaining 1,800 market-rate condominiums, fulfilling Atlantic Yards’ purpose.

“I think most people who live in Brooklyn today will be very proud of having a basketball team,” Mr. Ratner said. “They will be very proud of having an arena. They will be very proud of the housing part of the project.”

THOSE “in the footprint” are left waiting for the approaching storm.

In the past year, the state liquor board has granted about 40 liquor licenses to establishments near the arena, and Barclays Center’s four premium bars, with a combined maximum capacity of 1,800, will serve alcohol up to an hour after events, with last call at 1 a.m.

At a meeting in early September, residents expressed concern about alcohol use by arena patrons. The new police precinct commander, Capt. Michael Ameri, tried to dismiss their fears. “These are very wealthy people,” he said, and many in the crowd of about 50 gasped at his equation of money and decorum.

Regina Cahill, who lives about 400 feet from the arena and is a board member of the North Flatbush Area Business Improvement District, preached caution. “I feel very strongly that it is unfair to characterize every patron of the arena as an uncivilized outsider, a driver ‘under the influence’ looking to loiter and destroy our quality of life,” she said.

Parking looms as the other specter. This spring, the state cut parking spaces at the arena’s lot two blocks away by half, to 550, and residents fear that rather than promoting the use of public transportation, the move will just increase the number of drivers trolling for street parking.

At yet another meeting with Forest City officials, Louis Galdieri, a Park Slope resident, asked whether the company would support residential-permit parking for the neighborhood, an idea that the city’s Transportation Department shot down, but will revisit. Ashley Cotton, Forest City’s vice president for external affairs, said it was “not opposed” to permit parking, but passed responsibility to the state.

“Suddenly, Forest City is powerless to address it after kicking people off their land? I don’t think so,” Mr. Galdieri said with disgust.

Michael Pintchik’s company owns 65 properties near the arena, and he said some areas had been “poking up weeds” before the project. Now he is courting upscale restaurateurs and national retailers like Pottery Barn to storefronts currently occupied by furniture stores and computer repair shops. Before Forest City broke ground, he said, rents were running $45 to $50 a square foot. Now, they are $150 to $175.

The Triangle Sports building, owned by one family for the past 96 years at Flatbush Avenue and Dean Street, sold this past week for $4.1 million, $900 per square foot, said Benjamin Bernstein of Redsky Capital LLC, which bought the three-story building for retail purposes. Timothy King, a founding partner of CPEX Real Estate Services in Brooklyn, a commercial firm, said the price was in a “rarefied stratosphere for Brooklyn.”

Ravi Aggarwal is one of the small-business owners hoping to benefit from proximity to the site. In 2007, he opened Arena Bagels on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, two blocks from the project. But the name got so much backlash that he changed it to A.R.E.A. Bagels, for the initials of family members, he said.

Mr. Aggarwal put the “N” from the sign away for safekeeping, and is not likely to put it back up after the arena opens.

He said, “My first priority is to serve the neighborhood,” which he hopes will be upgraded by the arena. Then again, he added, “I don’t know the future.”

A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2012, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: In Brooklyn, Bracing for Hurricane Barclays. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe